Broomfield gets personal in latest film
‘Emotional experience’: Documentarian examines relationship with his photographer father
In his four decades of documentary filmmaking, Nick Broomfield has been surrounded by South African Nazis, he has met with serial killer Aileen Wuornos, who killed seven men, and even confronted Courtney Love.
All those were difficult assignments, but according to Broomfield, his toughest film experience was documenting his history with his own father, the renowned British industrial photographer Maurice Broomfield, for the new film My Father and Me.
The documentary has its Canadian premiere at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival, which runs until Oct. 11. Broomfield will attend the Oct. 6 screening of the film and do a question-and-answer session after.
“I’ve never done anything more difficult,” said Broomfield recently over the phone from London. “It was a very emotional experience. I still can’t actually sit through it without weeping a couple of times. It’s really exhausting actually. In the editing room, I always had to push my chair farther back from my editor so he couldn’t see that I was coming to pieces.”
Broomfield has done a handful of features, but he is most known for his rich career in documentaries. Some of his well-known works include: The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife; Kurt & Courtney; Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer; Whitney: Can I Be Me; and Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love.
This time out, his father Maurice, who died in 2010 at age 94, is in his viewfinder. While both are accomplished artists using cameras to tell their stories, the Broomfields, for a long time, didn’t agree much on how each of them told those stories.
Maurice — that’s what he insisted he be called instead of dad — was the product of a true working-class factory town. Men and women were proud of their jobs. They went to work in suits, ties and lovely shoes.
Maurice left school at age 15 to work in the Rolls-Royce factory.
“He had a kind of love, in a way, for the working man. He did these incredible pictures that glorified them and their lives and made them beautiful,” said Broomfield about his father’s photos from the ’50s to the ’70s.
But Nick didn’t see things that way.
He was a middle-class kid, a bit unruly, who enjoyed privilege and who couldn’t wrap his head around his father’s romantic view of factory life. Where Maurice saw beautiful arches and circular shapes, Nick saw grimy gears and rusted pipes.
“When he took me to the factories I just thought this was like a hell hole,” said Nick. “This is the most terrifying place I’ve ever been to and your pictures are a complete distortion of what it’s like. And so, when I started working, I always depicted factories as the most awful places in the world.
“I think he thought my films were exactly what he wanted to get away from.”
The film was nudged along by the fact that the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England, is opening a retrospective show of Maurice’s work next year. During the creation of that exhibition came the uncovering of archival film footage, negatives, books and other biographical bits from his life.
While chronicling the Broomfield father/son reality, the film digs into the Broomfield family tree, which includes: an intellectual Communist mother; a grandfather who helped liberate the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany in 1945; another grandfather who was a lace designer; and a cameraman uncle who travelled the world with David Attenborough making Zoo Quest.
Uncle Chunk, as Nick called Charles Lagus, had a habit of bringing home artifacts and orphans of the animal variety. The latter including a flying squirrel and a small Malaysian bear that Nick grew up playing with.
“I always remember my Uncle Chunk. He used to take the bear for a walk on Hampstead Heath, which is something you could never do now,” Nick said. “He said the funniest thing was once someone shouted at him: ‘Your dog has got rickets!’”
While these characters are specific, there is a wonderful generality — a kind of openness to the film that pulls you in for a closer look at relationships that, at their root, seem comfortingly familiar.
“I think you go through different phases with your relationship, with probably both your parents, but I certainly did with my father,” said Nick.
“I went through a period of hero-worshipping him and loving all his stories and then becoming increasingly rebellious when I was a teenager, then openly kind of at war with him. I think he didn’t think I knew what I was doing, which was probably correct. And I thought he was incapable of being supportive. He had his own particular way of doing things.
“But I think most of us have been through a similar kind of pattern of growing up. So, hopefully, it’s not just about the two of us, but other people will reflect on their own experiences.”